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Crews of Money Penny and Missy Bear on Tilos, ready for lunch I love descending south from Leros, but coming back is often a climb. And a slog. The prevailing summer winds in the Dodecanese are north-westerlies. Sometimes you can get a southerly and hitch a ride back up, but that is not often. Leaving Leros, we had good, prevailing winds to take us down to Vlichadia, a bay at the south of mountainous Kalymnos, just west of Kalymnos town. Money Penny was already in the bay on

Halki castle looking south-east towards Rhodes I wasn’t very good at history at school, maybe because the way it was taught didn’t interest me. Perhaps because he’s my namesake, I remember Richard I (the Lionheart). He was an English king and knight, and went off on a crusade with other English men to win back Jerusalem from Saladin and his Muslim hordes. Good English pilgrims would then once more be safe to travel to the Holy Land. I even constructed and painted an Airfix-li

Missy Bear leaving Tilos In my last blog, we left you as we were driving northwards across the Alps northwards, leaving Italy. This was the opposite of Hannibal, who entered Italy with his elephants 2,200 years ago, heading southwards towards his Roman enemy, during the second Punic war.  His thirty plus elephants were probably small North-African species, and he is thought to have used trainers (mahouts) from the Indian sub-continent to keep the beast under control. Hannibal

Our return to Greece was a bit reminiscent of “Trains, Planes and Automobiles”, except for us it was “Automobiles, Planes and Ferries”. Our taxi turned up at 04:15 to whisk us off to Bristol Airport, which we rather naively assumed would be quiet. It was absolutely heaving, full of stag and hen parties. We were desperate for coffee, and had to manoeuvre our way through the, “ I’m on holiday, therefore I’m having a pint ” brigade. We stood open-mouthed at a hen party, where th

We don’t know the Italian mainland that well. We had done a few fly-in, city-breaks in the distant past (Rome, Florence, Naples, Verona, Bologna, Lake Maggiore) but never been to the boot-shaped peninsular for a week’s holiday, to soak up the atmosphere and culture. Jonny couldn’t believe we had stayed so few days in Italy on our way out to the boat. So, we decided not to head home via the Balkans and eastern Europe, but to pass again through Italy. Apart from that, we had no